These are the kinds of questions being explored by researchers who recently gathered for a workshop, “Neural Mechanisms of Attention and Awareness,” hosted by the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience (KIN). It brought together five scientists from the Yale School of Medicine and Yale College. The first speaker was Hal Blumenfeld, a professor of neurology who studies the brain circuits underpinning consciousness and how they are disrupted by seizures in individuals with epilepsy.
David McCormick, a professor of neuroscience who served as Vice Director of KIN for more than a decade, also presented. Studying mice, McCormick has not only discovered that an animal's mental state can be gauged by monitoring its pupil size; but also that pupil size directly corresponds with the activity level of individual neurons in the brain during performance of a task. When pupils are mid-sized, corresponding to moderate levels of arousal, individual neurons are relatively quiet, as if standing by to react to information coming in through the senses. McCormick has likened this state to an athlete “being in the zone,” and is continuing to explore the neural mechanisms of optimal performance.
After 30 years at Yale, McCormick is moving to the University of Oregon in Eugene to direct the university’s Institute of Neuroscience. He will continue his long-standing affiliation with Yale as Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Scientist in Neuroscience.
Nicholas Turk-Browne, who recently moved his lab to Yale from Princeton and is a professor of psychology, studies cognitive processes such as perception and attention. He discussed his research on using brain imaging to track a person’s level of attention in real time. He has also tested whether feeding back this information can be used as a “mind booster” to improve a person’s focus and, ultimately, performance of a mental task.
Turk-Browne completed his doctorate at Yale under the guidance of Marvin Chun and Brian Scholl, professors in the department of psychology who also presented at the Kavli Workshop.
The Kavli Institute's semi-annual workshops aim to foster the exchange of ideas and techniques among scientists from different fields who share the goal of understanding the functional properties of the cerebral cortex.